Museums and Racism

Museums and Racism Racism is a hot topic in museums today, as well as an urgent social issue. Focused on the broad field of multicultural policy,Museums and Racism examines how the Immigration Museum in Melbourne, Australia, has responded to political culture and public debate around racism. Analysis focuses on the conceptualization of the Immigration Museum in the mid-1990s, and on the most recent permanent exhibition to be opened there, in 2011, which coincided with the publication of a new multicultural policy for Australia. The opening of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra in the intervening period is also examined in some detail, as a comparative case study to provide a sense of the broader national social and political context. Message argues that each of the three episodes demonstrates the close relationship between museum and exhibition development on the one hand, and policy, politics, and public opinion on the other hand. Including a discussion of examples from the United States and other relevant contexts, Museums and Racism is key reading for students and scholars of museum studies and cultural studies around the world. The book should also be of great interest to museum practitioners and policymakers in the area of multiculturalism. Kylie Message is Associate Professor and Senior Fellow in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. She is the Series Editor of ‘Museums in Focus’. Museums in Focus Series Editor: Kylie Message Committed to the articulation of big, even risky, ideas in small format pub- lications, ‘Museums in Focus’ challenges authors and readers to experiment with, innovate, and press museums and the intellectual frameworks through which we view these. It offers a platform for approaches that radically rethink the relationships between cultural and intellectual crisis and debates about museums, politics, and the broader public sphere. ‘Museums in Focus’ is motivated by the intellectual hypothesis that museums are not innately ‘useful’, safe’ or even ‘public’ places, and that recalibrating our thinking about them might benefit from adopting a more radical and oppositional form of logic and approach. Examining this prob- lem requires a level of comfort with (or at least tolerance of ) the ideas of dissent, protest, and radical thinking, and authors might benefit from con- sidering how cultural and intellectual crisis, regeneration and anxiety have been dealt with in other disciplines and contexts. Recently published titles: The Disobedient Museum Writing at the Edge Kylie Message Museums and Racism Kylie Message https://www.routledge.com/Museums-in-Focus/book-series/MIF Logo by James Verdon (2017) Museums and Racism Kylie Message First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Kylie Message The right of Kylie Message to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-24017-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-29389-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC Anonymous graffiti, Athens. Image and logo by James Verdon (2017). For Ezra Contents List of illustrations viii Acknowledgements ix It’s a summer of sequels. The culture wars are back. So is the civil rights movement 1 1 Museums 9 2 Multiculturalism 45 3 Racism 71 I feel like I belong when I am made to feel welcome 108 Bibliography 114 Index 132 List of illustrations 0.1 ‘Who’s Next Door?’ tram installation, Identity: yours, mine, ours exhibition, Immigration Museum 2 1.1 Immigration Museum, Old Customs House, Melbourne 10 2.1 National Museum of Australia, Canberra 46 3.1 ‘Welcome’ installation, Lynette Wallworth, Identity: yours, mine, ours exhibition, Immigration Museum 72 4.1 Model Fishing Boat – Pulau Bidong Refugee Camp, Malaysia, Tran van Hoang, Museum Victoria 109 Acknowledgements Writing this book catapulted me back to my roots. I was a curatorial assis- tant at the Museum of Victoria for a period in the late 1990s, where I learnt vast amounts about working across theory, case study research, and prac- tical day-to-day museum work from inspiring, energetic, and generous museum staff including MaryAnne McCubbin, Eddie Butler-Bowden, John Kean, and Dean Wilson. I am grateful for this experience, which seeded my fascination for institutional ethnography and my understanding of museums as multifaceted conglomerations – infrastructure – that combine institutional governance and operational features largely invisible to the public with public outcomes such as exhibitions and programs. I was not involved in the Immigration Museum development, but I recall many meetings at which it was the subject of discussion for the Australian Society program area in which I was located. This book has directly benefitted from that experience, as well as from the conversations and researches that have filled the twenty years since, specifically across the institutions of Museum - Vic toria, the National Museum of Australia, the University of Melbourne, and the Australian National University, and with individuals to whom I owe a special debt of thanks for formative conversations about museums, politics, diversity, mobilities, and migration: Howard Morphy, Mary Hutchison, Paul Pickering, Jakob Parby, and Laurence Gouriévidis. I warmly acknowledge Ezra Johnston for the insight and guidance he provided about sequels and trilogies. Set against this background, much of the research that has informed this book was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects funding scheme (DP 120100594) for ‘Collecting institutions, cultural diversity and the making of citizenship in Australia since the 1970s’, a project led by Andrea Witcomb (Deakin University) that involved Ian McShane (RMIT) and myself, as well as Simon Knell (University of Leicester) and Arne Bugge Amundsen (Uni- versity of Oslo), with research assistance by Philipp Schorch and Karen x Acknowledgements Schamberger. The project drew on numerous institutional archives in Aus- tralia, with the Immigration Museum and Museum Victoria being most relevant for this particular book. Moya McFadzeon (Immigration Museum) has provided ongoing support throughout the project, and the idea for this book resulted from a forum, ‘Owning Racism – Can We Talk?’ that she organized to coincide with the launch of Identity: yours, mine, ours at the Immigration Museum in 2011. I am grateful to Museum Victoria for providing and approving the reproduction of images (Figures 0.1, 3.1, and 4.1). Chapter 2 is an expanded and updated version of ‘Culture, citizenship and Australian multiculturalism: the contest over identity formation at the National Museum of Australia’,Humanities Research, XV (2), 2009: 23–48, and I acknowledge ANU Press for permission to use this work in the very different context of this book. Additionally, I am very grateful for a period of research leave provided by the Australian National University, which enabled the completion of this book. I continue to be indebted to Heidi Lowther and the editorial team at Routledge for their continuing support and commitment to the Museums in Focus series. Finally, although this book has relied primarily on archival research, much of the writing has occurred at kitchen tables rather than offices or desks, in various places, over several years. I am indebted to everyone who shared their stories, experiences, lives, and tables with me and mine. This includes my family – Guy Jones, Oscar Johnston and Ezra Johnston, as well as Bob and Jill Message – who have lived and contributed to this book in too many ways to mention, and to whom I am endlessly grateful. It’s a summer of sequels. The culture wars are back. So is the civil rights movement1 Three-way thinking Last year I set myself the task of trying to complete three related books in close succession. I wanted to start playing out some of the questions I was asking authors contributing to the Museums in Focus series to exam- ine. I was motivated less by a desire to privilege any particular discipli- nary approach than by the intention to test out different ideas about how we think about museums and extend processes of self-reflection to the exercise of writing about them. As short books, my rationale went, they could be more responsive to contemporary events and change, more experimental and process oriented. The quick production time and electronic publication also appealed. The books would circulate in the public sphere alongside the topics and debates upon which they were commenting. My intention was to retain proximity between the books and their context in the hope that this approach would counteract some of the concerns that critique can fetishize the expert authority who operates at a distance.2 Furthermore, although the research and scholarship had to be of the highest quality, the books could be published as critical engagements with events and actions, reflections on previous thinking about a topic, they could profile moments in time, or function as works-in-progress. The links and conversations that exist and might be created between the books and other forms of theorizing about museums, culture, and politics – based in museum studies or not – would, I hope, become a more significant outcome of the series than any individual book itself.

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